Membrane (Brane) Gravity - String Theory, M-Theory, Gravity, and a Physics "Theory of Everything" (TOE); Predicting Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and how our universe began and will end

BraneBrain.com

Explaining our universe and multiverse from before it began until after it ends, including Dark Matter, Dark Energy and even "Dark Flow".

These concepts were developed between 2003-2006 by Andrew L. Bender

A Hypothesis for a Membrane Theory of Gravity

Andrew L. Bender (
) www.BraneBrain.com

Abstract: Proposed is a modification of gravity in M-Theory that could
successfully combine relativity and quantum mechanics by means of a
membrane (brane) theory of gravity. The force of gravity would be produced by
the curvature of our brane caused by the vibrations of individual strings of
matter in the three gravity dimensions of M-Theory. Gravity’s weakness
would be due to the size of our membrane relative to the Planck length
of an individual string. If the forces of electromagnetism and gravity were
roughly equivalent when our brane began as the Planck length, then as it
expanded to its current size, the strength of gravity would have decreased in
proportion to our membrane’s size, roughly calculated to have a maximum
radius of 526 trillion light-years when fully expanded. This theory allows for
a direct method of energy transfer from membrane collision to individual virtual
strings present within the brane at the instant of the collision. This explains
the creation of our universe without a singularity while keeping physics intact
throughout the big splash. Dark matter and dark energy are revealed to
be vibrations of our membrane left over from the original collision that
created our universe. The relaxation of those vibrations (whose potential
energy is being converted into kinetic energy) causes spacetime to expand
more rapidly as it ages and to accelerate its expansion rate until all dark
matter relaxes completely, stopping the acceleration. Additionally, several
methods of observational confirmation of this hypothesis (and therefore string
theory as well) are proposed.

Ed Witten’s M-theory has brought string theory into the 21st century by combining the five previous string theories into one brilliant nearly all-encompassing theory of our universe. However, this theory leaves one thing lacking: a satisfactory theory of gravity. In M-Theory, gravity is thought to be made of closed-loop strings which can escape our membrane (brane for short) as they are not attached to it, creating “disappearing gravitons”. However, the only way to make this concept work is to introduce a highly unlikely parallel membrane from which gravity leaks to us as Princeton’s Lisa Randall has postulated.1 This is highly unlikely because in membrane gravity, membranes arise randomly from a froth of bubbling branes that are brought into existence by the agitation of spacetime itself by quantum noise. The likelihood of two branes evolving such a symbiotic relationship from a random process seems highly unlikely.

Physicists are currently looking for evidence of closed-loop “disappearing gravitons” in atom smashers as we speak. According to membrane gravity, they will not succeed. Our universe is a highly elegant and efficient creation, and leaking gravitons just do not seem to fit squarely into that elegant universe. The first problem with these loops of leaking gravitons, and therefore current M-theory, is that it has no clear mechanism for energy transfer from a membrane collision directly to the other brane. Other problems include its failure to predict dark matter and energy and having to rely on parallel universes in order for gravity to work properly.

A much more likely possibility is a membrane theory of gravity. This " theory of everything " states that gravity is not a leaking closed-loop string, but that all strings are actually Planck-length tubes of our membrane itself. These tubes are generated from our brane by quantum noise in the form of virtual strings. According to Brian Greene, Michio Kaku, and a number of other physicists, even nothing is highly unstable on the quantum level. Virtual strings are tiny disturbances in our brane generated by quantum noise. Every now and then, two of these strings are disturbed into existence, one vibrating the opposite of the other, one on the interior of our membrane, and one vibrating on the exterior of our brane, and both being entangled at the quantum level because they are still connected through higher dimensions. (Entanglement means that they are connected through our brane, and that they must vibrate with the opposite spin of one another since they were formed from the same conjoined pair of virtual strings, connected through our membrane itself through its higher spatial dimensions.) Vibrations are not being transferred through the higher dimensions from one string to the other, only spin. Therefore, no matter where they roam in our universe, they are still connected. Causing one half to change its spin will cause the other half to flip its spin. Virtual strings exist only for fleeting moments as they are disturbed into existence by quantum noise, and then merge back into nothingness as their waves cancel each other out.

Exactly how would a collision of membranes transfer energy into a new universe? Current theory is not entirely clear on this subject, and the result is a big bang starting from a singularity, which is mathematically impossible. The beauty of string theory is that it does away with the need for any singularities because the smallest anything can be is the Planck length of 10-33 cm (10-35 m), as that is the size of a single string. (The Planck length is also the smallest anything can be in standard physics, but that didn’t stop them from trying to create a singularity.) The core of a type I black hole would no longer be a singularity, but an extremely small core less than a meter to a few meters across of compactified strings. A type II black hole (supermassive) may have a core a few tens of meters across at it's core. Information would not be destroyed within a black hole (as it would be within a singularity), but is recycled as Hawking radiation with the same information as the matter that was swallowed by the hole due to quantum teleportation.2 One virtual string falls into the black hole, and the other is accelerated away from it. The string that fell into the hole annihilates a string whose quantum information is connected to the string that escaped from the event horizon. Like the black hole, our universe would no longer begin from a singularity either.

Singularities are likely not the answer for either black holes or the beginning of our universe, because they also create nonsensical mathematics. After considering how branes collide and vibrate, it appeared that there had to be a direct method of energy transfer from each membrane to the new universe at the fundamental level of each individual string. Strings and branes interacting with each other seems possible as they are both made of the same "substance", with one being stretched out to an enormous degree compared to the other. If two of these membranes were to collide, the virtual strings that existed within each brane at the exact moment of impact (about five percent of our universe was in the process of generating virtual strings at the moment of impact) would be vibrated into strings of matter and antimatter. This is possible because the strings of membrane gravity are two-dimensional tubes of our brane itself. When vibrated by a big splash collision of branes, these strings will pull their ends together more tightly the more violently they are struck. (See Fig. 1.) Therefore, our membrane now is spacetime itself. According to string theory and Brian Greene, the higher the frequency of a string, the more massive the particle it emulates. This is also true in membrane gravity. The higher the frequency of a string, the more energy it has, and the further its vibrations will curve the membrane around it, creating the force of gravity.

Fig. 1. A representation of an “MRI view” of a membrane, strings, and their curvature of spacetime. In this sliced-open diagram, the lines on the left and right represent our membrane and its curvature. The three horizontal strings (hollow two-dimensional tubes) are (top) a virtual string that hardly vibrates at all and is basically a hollow tube that was separated from our brane by quantum noise; (middle) a string that represents a quark or other massive particle given energy from the big splash; and (bottom) a string that represents a more massive strange, charmed, or similar quark given additional energy from a high-velocity impact with another string whose mass (vibrations) curves our brane even farther, creating the force of gravity. The more periods the string has (that is, the more rapidly it vibrates), the more it contracts the membrane due to its vibrations and motion and the more massive the particle it emulates.

By eliminating the closed-loop strings of M-Theory and replacing them with the simple and straight forward curvature of our membrane caused by the vibrations of strings of matter, we eliminate the necessity of relying on a contortion of parallel universes to explain the laws of nature. Our universe is an elegant creation, even if its mathematics are turning out to be more complex than we may have originally thought. Simplicity requires we recognize that the most likely solution is membrane gravity, not an unlikely relationship between randomly generated membranes.

In this model, our membrane grew from a quantum noise created Planck length bubble into an enormous three large spatial dimensional brane (with ten total spatial dimensions, plus a time dimension). That Planck-length bubble expanded because of the vacuum around it, and quantum noise within it when it was very small. Over time, this bubble would expand to the size of a universe, its surface area expanding inside and out. As it did, the effect of vibrations of standard Planck-length strings of matter (which curve our brane) would get weaker and weaker the more our brane grew larger and larger, decreasing the force of gravity as it grew as each vibrating string curved a smaller and smaller percentage of our membrane.

The rest of our multiverse would be generating more of these multidimensional membranes from the froth of quantum noise at the Planck length, and over time, a vast number of branes would be generated. It is only a matter of time before two of these branes collide with one another, being given tiny amounts of momentum from their creation and the quantum disturbances within them (and vacuum around them). In this model, time is no longer a dimension, but the rate at which individual strings vibrate.

In this theory, it is simple string vibrations and dynamics that create the effect of gravity. Gravitons are simply tiny ripples of our membrane generated, for example, in the fusion of hydrogen and other elements in the core of a star. Like dropping from the bottom string diagram in Fig. 1 to the middle string diagram, the string pushes a tiny ripple of our brane as it releases its energy. This sends a vibrating brane ripple away from the fused element. Currently, in our gravity wave detectors, we are detecting a noise which cannot yet be explained. As the noise is found at 10-16 meters, and not 10-35m as quantum noise is supposed to be, a possible solution is that we are detecting membrane gravity’s membrane ripples, and not quantum noise.3 The best explanation physicists can currently devise is that it is quantum noise in a holographic universe. The membrane "graviton" hypothesis can be tested by placing gravity wave detectors at the orbit of Saturn, as the "gravitons" (membrane ripples) will have grown in size the further from the sun (their source) that they travel, following gravity's inverse square law. Therefore, the noise in gravity wave detectors on Earth should be at a smaller scale than those detected at Saturn, having originated from our Sun.

According to membrane gravity, if we run the expansion of our universe backwards from its current point to the "big bang" itself, the previous theorists simply went too far back and assumed that the universe started from a single one-dimensional point before it inflated. Instead of the singularity of the standard model of the big bang, membrane gravity states that when our brane collided with another one, the vast majority of that energy was transferred directly to each membrane in the form of brane vibrations, which, in this theory, become dark matter as those vibrations cause our brane to vibrate and contract, increasing the amount of gravity in our universe (dark matter) as our brane shrinks and collapses due to those vibrations. Additionally, at the moment of impact of the big splash, approximately 5 percent of the brane would be in the process of generating virtual strings. This creates an outlet other than the brane proper where the energy of the collision could go, because strings are now made of our brane itself. This collision transfers those vibrations directly to the virtual strings within the brane at that instant, creating all matter and antimatter in the "big splash".

After our brane contracted due to the collision, our universe contracted to what could have been hundreds of millions to a billion light years across. (Virtually its size when it emitted the cosmic background radiation.) The universe would have cooled from the hot plasma of the collision and undergone its phase change perhaps just moments after the collision itself, due to its much larger starting size than a singularity.

In the areas of our brane that collided with the other brane, some peaks on the surface of our brane would collide with peaks of the colliding brane, generating areas of higher energy, creating heavier matter, and antimatter. Troughs colliding would create less energy, creating smaller amounts of matter and antimatter. All of the antimatter would have almost instantly been annihilated, and strings vibrated into quantum entangled quarks and electrons would have joined together into the first atoms of hydrogen, helium and lithium in our early universe. If some strings were left over from previous collisions of our brane, those strings would also be available to be vibrated further into matter and antimatter strings during the brane collision.

The small percentage of energy that got through to the virtual strings within each brane vibrated them in the three gravity dimensions of each string. This directly transferred energy to the non-energetic virtual strings within each membrane, creating matter and antimatter quarks and electrons in up and down pairs. The major brane vibrations that act as dark matter vibrate over large areas thousands of light-years across and even form dark matter clouds the size of galaxies. Huge chains of galaxy clusters are created, attracted to these long strands of dark matter webs, and form an enormous lattice of strands following the brane vibrations and appearing similar to a three-dimensional spider’s web. Membrane gravity would help to explain these huge structures as well, because as our brane was compressed during the collision due to its vibrations, a network of crossing membrane waves would form.

These vibrations of the membrane itself would cause it to contract quickly into a much smaller volume as the membrane vibrates rapidly back and forth. The dark matter generated by these brane vibrations could also cause the gases of the early universe to collapse and form into stars and galaxies earlier than one billion years after the big splash, much more rapidly than the standard model and M-Theory explained (before including "dark matter" without a comprehensive model for it). In addition, because our brane was contracting at the same time our universe was being formed, our universe was created in a way that may appear faster than light, but isn't. Our universe is currently expanding faster than light due to the relaxation of our brane as our universe expands. It may also appear like there was an explosion at the beginning of our universe, but it's actually the result of an implosion. This implosion created massive gravitational shockwaves that still reverberate throughout our universe. After it contracted, it exploded into what we see today as the cosmic background radiation.

Fig. 2 Two positive Branes colliding

As two branes collide, they create “big splashes” in/on each membrane radiating from the area of the collision/implosion. The vibrations would similarly reverberate throughout our brane, creating dense vibrating ripples of membrane (dark matter) throughout the new universe. The vibrations form a network of dark matter which helps to accelerate the formation of the new universe as the young gases are attracted to these dense vibrating dark matter regions. Additionally, this collision starts off our universe at a size much larger than previously theorized, doing away with the need for any singularities. Therefore, physics never breaks down in this model of our universe, unlike the big bang model where all of physics breaks down before 10-43 seconds into the expansion from the so-called singularity. The universe simply contracts from the impact, and then starts to expand from a size possibly hundreds of millions to a few billion light-years across. These branes would ripple slightly due to quantum noise and virtual strings generated when they first formed long before the collision, and those ripples would be imprinted on our universe. They appear as areas of higher and lower energy where the ripples constructively and destructively interfere with each other. This pattern is visible in the cosmic background radiation left over from the splash and implosion.

The "gravitons" (tiny gravity waves which begin as Planck-length) radiate according to the inverse square law (GM/r2) as the waves expand in three dimensions and dissipate throughout our universe into the rest of our brane (accounting for gravity’s weakness). Since the dark matter vibrations left over from the big splash are so enormous, and are confined only by the size of our brane itself, these vibrations will reverberate throughout our entire universe for billions of years. As our universe appears to expand, the dark matter brane vibrations will slowly be converted into dark energy as those vibrations relax and dissipate over time; pushing points that were close together farther apart (see fig. 3). This will happen as the vibrations of our membrane occur less frequently, especially in the “empty” regions of our universe between galaxy cluster strands.

The cooling of our universe will start to convert the potential energy of our vibrating membrane (dark matter) into kinetic energy (dark energy). This release of stored potential vibrating energy pushes our universe apart, accelerating slowly at first, and then increasing in speed until it relaxes nearly to its original size before the splash at which point the acceleration slows and eventually will end (as shown in fig. 3).

Fig. 3. Vibrations relaxing and the acceleration of our universe’s expansion due to membrane gravity (not to scale). As our membrane relaxes, two points that were closer together (A) get pushed farther apart (B) as the spacetime between them vibrates less frequently and becomes less compressed. As this occurs throughout our universe, it expands more rapidly until the brane relaxes almost completely, at which point the expansion slows down. Because of the rate at which brane vibrations relax, spreading out spacetime, dark energy (C) the rate of acceleration of our universe should appear fairly constant in the beginning. The universe’s acceleration begins slowly after the big splash due to the contraction of our brane, and its rapid vibrations from the collision. It continues to accelerate as dark matter is being constantly converted into dark energy (first in the starless regions of space), and will eventually slow down as the brane expands to its original, relaxed form, which can expand no further. This is much more intellectually satisfying than believing in a “big rip” where our universe tears itself apart for no good physical reason. Again, cosmologists are jumping the gun, and taking their observations to the extreme end of the spectrum, and assuming the laws of physics can be violated. As we never started from a singularity, we will never have a “big rip” either. As our universe expands back towards its original size before the membrane collision, our galaxies will fly apart as their dark matter halos relax their brane vibrations. Eventually, as the dark matter in our galaxies dissipates, so will the galaxies themselves.

Membrane gravity explains the mysteries of our universe. For example: why is gravity so weak? And why is so little of our universe’s mass made up of normal matter and energy that we can see. Our membrane began life as a single Planck length bubble. This brane eventually inflated to a size much larger than our own universe currently appears. When our brane was young and small, its interactions (if any) with strings of matter could have been much more powerful, similar to the electromagnetic interactions of strings today, which are 1039 times more powerful than the force of gravity.4

As our brane grew from the size of a string to a size larger than a galaxy and so on, its surface area inside and out continued to expand. As it did, the effect of vibrations of standard Planck-length strings of matter got weaker and weaker as those tiny strings stayed the same size while our brane continued to expand. The gravitational effect that only one of our strings of matter, such as a quark or electron, has on our brane continued to decrease as it had a smaller percentage of the membrane’s surface area to vibrate on. When our brane finally reached its current size, the vibrations of strings of matter have an infinitesimal effect on the tiny percentage of the brane that they vibrate on. Therefore, according to membrane gravity, gravity’s weakness should be directly proportional to the size of our membrane.

Because of this, it may be possible to calculate the approximate size of our brane. We do this by comparing the strength of gravity to the electromagnetic force (as they may have been comparable when our brane and a single string of matter were of equal size) and then by factoring in the distance that the electromagnetic force acts over. The approximate distance between a proton and an electron in a hydrogen atom (the Bohr radius) is about 5 * 10-11 m. If we multiply this by the difference in power between the two forces (1039 times), we get 5 * 1030 m. A light-year is 9.5 * 1015 m, so if we divide our result by the distance in a light-year, we get 5.26 * 1014 light years or a maximum radius of 526 trillion light-years across (the more accurate the radius of an electron, the more accurate the size). If our universe is at least 93 billion light-years in diameter as a recent WMAP science team study found5, then our membrane could be nearly eleven thousand times larger than our universe currently appears. As our universe continues to expand, it relaxes back to its original size, and it shouldn’t reach that maximum size for hundreds of billions of years.

A membrane theory of gravity could also change our idea of what multiple universes are within other membranes. Current theory states that the initial conditions of a big bang or big splat determine all of the physics of the universe created from it. It is currently believed that other universes will all be very different, and that it just happens to be luck that initial conditions of our universe were so favorable for life. However, if membrane gravity is correct, all universes created within branes such as ours will have nearly identical laws of physics. Only the strength of gravity will differ, depending on the size of the brane the universe is created within. Thus the smaller the brane, the stronger the force of gravityand the more powerful the collision that creates the universe, the more energetic the matter and antimatter strings that will be created within it. This also explains why so much more matter than antimatter was created by the big splash, as it takes so much more energy to create antimatter than normal matter.

If a brane collides more gently than ours did, less matter and hardly any antimatter would be created within it. If the brane were smaller than ours as well, its stronger force of gravity could compensate for the smaller collision to create a viable universe, habitable by creatures like us. If, on the other hand, an enormous brane has a minor collision with another brane, the small amount of matter created (and its weak gravity) would make for a universe of diffuse gas that may never form a single star.

If membrane gravity is correct, it should be verifiable through observation using several methods. We could calculate the average mass of space in the universe during the first eight billion years of its existence, mostly in the “empty” regions of diffuse gas between galaxy clusters, and compare those results with the average mass of empty space in the universe during the last five billion years. If our results show that dark matter has been disappearing as our universe’s expansion has been accelerating (and losing mass during the last five billion years), it would confirm the membrane theory of gravity and validate string theory. Gravity would not be leaking from our universe as M-Theory predicts or originate from a membrane or dimension just slightly away from our own as Lisa Randall postulates. Another method of confirmation would be to measure the diameter of dark matter waves over time. If, the further we look back in time, the smaller the diameter of dark matter waves (vibrations) are, this would further support membrane gravity.

The energy required to create an electron is much less than the energy required to create a positron, and the same relationship applies to all other types of matter and their antimatter partners. If our universe was created by a collision of branes which transferred kinetic energy directly to each brane, and 5 percent of that energy was transferred directly to the virtual strings within our brane, then the ratio of matter to antimatter during the splash should be directly proportional to the amount of energy required to create that matter and antimatter. If the collision imparted its energy directly to the virtual strings, it should do so according to the laws of physics and not break down like the big bang model. After the splash, when matter condenses out, the splash behaves exactly as the big bang model does, with the same ratios of elements created. Observation supports this. The elements created in the big splash are directly proportional to the amount of energy it takes to create them, supporting this theory of brane gravity.

Because our universe could have been created at such a large size (possibly hundreds of millions to billions of light-years across), the quarks and electrons created in the collision may have condensed almost instantly after the implosion. This would mean that the cosmic background radiation may not have been created 380,000 years after the big splash as is currently thought. Instead, the CBR could have been created very shortly after the splash, and possibly within moments, and much more rapidly than the standard model predicts. Our membrane appeared to contract to this size after the collision that created it, then appeared to expand from this larger size. There was no singularity, and the laws of physics never broke down. Our universe would have rapidly cooled and coalesced from hot quarks and electrons into hydrogen and helium atoms due to the relatively large size of the early universe. This would mean that when we look at the CBR, we could be looking almost directly at an image of the creation of the universe itself. According to the WMAP science team, our observable universe is roughly 93 billion light-years in diameter after 13.75 billion years of expansion.

Another recent piece of evidence in favor of membrane gravity is the Hubble Space Telescope study of 2003 by quantum gravity physicists. They found that the universe is not as “pixilated” as it should appear if spacetime were pixilated at the Planck length of 10-35m (the smallest anything can be according to string theory, as well as the length of a single string). Quantum gravity physicists believe that photons traveling through our universe would move from “pixel to pixel” of Planck length segments as they travel.6 Images of objects that are farther away should appear pixilated compared to nearby objects as more distant photons travel through more segments of space. However, these results were not found. Photos of both nearby and distant objects appeared equally clear. Instead of casting doubt on the Planck length or other solid physics, it is further support for membrane gravity that photons are not traveling through “pixilated” space. Rather they are traveling through a perfectly smooth membrane, which would not blur photons in the least.

We need to move from a particle-based view of our universe to a membrane and string-based view. Researchers are having trouble figuring out dark matter, dark energy, and many other recent discoveries because they view our universe as a collection of particles within a vacuum with “nothing” beyond the edge of our universe. Even M-Theory currently suffers from this view as it still does not see our membrane as the source of gravity, with each string currently behaving like a particle in standard physics. The closed-loop graviton string is what is holding M-Theory back from becoming a complete theory of physics. The picture of our universe becomes so much more clear when we realize that we live within a fluid-like membrane that is the source of our gravitational force. Because of this, all matter and energy are simply vibrating strings, formed from and connected to our membrane, that travel through our brane and whose vibrations generate all the forces of nature that we observe.

Additionally, inflationary models of the big bang had been under tighter scrutiny in recent years as results from WMAP were analyzed, and the results did not quite match predictions. This was a very difficult feat, considering there were so many different inflationary predictions. The inflationary models have many problems, one of which is quite similar to complaints about the first five string theories before they were unified. There were so many different inflationary approaches, with such a wide range of predictions that it has been suggested that inflation could never be disproved by observation!7 Here is another problem with inflationary models: What caused the inflation and the “bang” in the first place? This question can never be answered with current models, which is very frustrating to say the least. Some physicists seem not to mind being unknowledgeable of what event actually triggered our universe’s creation and expansion. However, it seems vital for any comprehensive theory of our universe to be able to predict how our universe began and how it will end. Well, and everything in-between, too.

In a Science magazine article by Adrian Cho, the finding by Christoph Adami, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and the Keck Graduate Institute in Claremont, that quantum entanglement is linked to gravity could be one of the strongest pieces of evidence yet for membrane gravity.8 If two particles such as electrons are entangled, an observer could manipulate the observation of one of the particles, and cause it to spin up. (Electrons have two types of spin: one called “up” and the other, “down.”) When the particle spins up, they would instantly know that the other entangled particle’s spin is down, no matter how far away it is. This interaction only makes sense with membrane gravity, because all strings of matter and energy in our universe are made from our brane. The string's gravitational vibrations curve our brane. Quantum information could only be transmitted or linked if the strings themselves were connected or linked in some way, as they would be through our brane, with each pair of strings being physically connected through our brane with one string vibrating on the outside of the two-dimensional tarus-shaped membrane, and the other vibrating on the inside, each with opposite spin. Where the string passes through our membrane, connecting the two entangled strings, there is another third spatial dimension separating the two halves, allowing them to travel in three total spatial dimensions. All matter in our universeand even light itself, which vibrates in only two gravity dimensions and one higher dimensionis moving through our brane, constantly connected to it, and curving it in two gravity dimensions. No other theory can yet account for why quantum entanglement would be linked to gravity, including M-Theory where gravity is not linked to anything and passes right through our brane as if it were not even there.

Photons and strings of matter curve our brane as they vibrate. As they do so, they create “dimples” in our brane which allows strings to interact via those dimples. A photon will curve our brane in the two gravity dimensions it vibrates in. This curvature of our brane allows photons to interact with each string of matter’s curvature of our brane (in all three gravity dimensions). This allows a photon’s wavelength to decrease as it strikes a string of matter, transferring energy to the string of matter either through the collision of its brane dimples, or the string itself, conserving energy.

A membrane theory of gravity also explains why E=MC2. As a string of matter vibrates, it curves our membrane in three different dimensions. However, when a string of matter is converted into energy, the string will only vibrate in two of the three gravity dimensions, transferring the energy from the one gravity dimension removed into the two remaining gravity dimensions that travel at the speed of light, conserving the string’s energy. Therefore, the string’s energy remains constant as it vibrates in fewer gravity dimensions. E=MC2 simply illustrates the conservation of energy as the vibrations of a string in three gravity dimensions are transferred into the vibrations of a string in only two gravity dimensions that travel at the speed of light.

This theory could also explain why all fundamental strings have two types of spin. If, when the big splash occurred, the only strings available within our brane to transfer energy to were virtual strings that existed at the precise instant of the collision, then the energy of the collision would have been transferred directly to each pair of virtual strings through membrane vibrations caused by the big splash. Each pair of strings would have been given the same amount of energy depending on their location within the brane. One pair, if given enough energy to become electrons, would split apart as their electromagnetic vibrations repelled one another, and one of the electrons would spin up, and the other would spin down. This occurs because the waves of each virtual string in the pair vibrate on the opposite side of our brane, because the pair would cancel each other out when they joined back together and disappeared if they had not been struck by the big splash, and those vibrations repel the two strings.

(This paragraph is a 2010-2012 update.) Membrane gravity can even explain the so-called "Dark Flow" of our early universe. According to observation, young galaxies in our early universe are rapidly "flowing" in one direction. This would not be surprising depending on the shape of our universe's membrane. The collision that created our universe created enormous waves of our brane in the form of space-curving membrane vibrations. If our brane was in the shape of a tarus (like in fig. 2), when it was struck by another brane, it would vibrate back and forth like a closed-loop string with four areas of extremely increased dark matter at the four "pivot points" of the vibrating doughnut. These four points between the peaks and troughs of the waves are constantly being bent back and forth, creating areas of increased dark matter. This increase in gravity at those four points in our universe will draw all nearby galaxies in their direction, creating what we observe as "dark flow".

(The next four paragraphs are a 2012 update, developed 2006-2009.)

If membrane gravity is correct, then all we really need to know is:
1) How quantum noise works and creates membranes in a vacuum
2) How to create virtual strings within those membranes, and
3) What happens when those virtual strings collide with each other, other strings, or are given energy through a membrane collision.
Everything in our universe can be explained by just these three processes! Every string in our universe began life as a lowly virtual string. Once we fully understand these processes in a membrane gravity framework, we should be able to truly understand our multiverse and where it came from, and where it's going.

Membrane Gravity can also explain standard particle physics by string collisions with themselves and with virtual strings, creating a neutrino! When a photon or subatomic particle collides with one of a pair of virtual strings, some of its energy is transferred to the virtual string, giving it energy as seen in particle accelerators. The other virtual string, however, since it has no partner left, (and very little energy) becomes a neutrino (which we can barely detect), and this is why... This means that there are no "messenger particles," just string collisions with other strings and virtual strings. Virtual strings are the answers to almost all our questions about how physics works. They were there at the beginning of our universe when our membrane collided with another, vibrating their gravity dimensions into quarks and electrons, and they're the way every new photon and particle is collided into existence in places from atom smashers to stars.

One other note on black holes and their information. When black holes evaporate, quantum information escapes. In addition, the next time a membrane collides with ours, black holes will explode, showering their strings everywhere which, with the extra energy given to them from the collision, become antimatter and more energetic matter, much of which collides and annihilates itself in the next universe created.

According to membrane gravity, our universe will likely end in ice, then be reborn in fire. Since its expansion is currently accelerating, our universe will end up being a cold, dark place, but the galaxies still remaining in our ancient universe will cling together until near the time our brane expands back out to its full size, and the galaxies lose the dark matter holding them together. At this point, all of our galaxies will have flown apart, sending their stars out into the universe. The last of the stars will eventually die out, and long after that the remaining black holes will evaporate. If it hasn't happened by this point, another membrane will eventually collide with ours again, and this universe will be reborn, starting the process all over again.

It should also be clear by now that our own universe is finite, not infinite, being contained within a single membrane of which there are a multitude. The multiverse, unfortunately, is infinite with all of the consequences thereof. (Don't ask...)

2017 Addition: One thing I neglected to describe in detail was how everything starts from nothing, and returns back to nothing. (As any good TOE should, or else it isn't really a TOE.) As with our Universe, so goes the Multiverse. For example, when a pair of membranes are created by "noise" at Planck-length scales, both positive and negatively shaped branes are created. If the positive brane hadn't collided with another positive brane wandering by, the original two branes would have merged back together and canceled each other out, disappearing back into nothingness. Eventually, this will happen to our universe when it collides with an oppositely shaped brane. We may have good luck, and collide with a few more positive branes first, but eventually, one of those negative branes will have our name on it. And, you guessed it, when we collide, back to nothing we will go... However, don't despair. I bet we'll find a way to get information, if not beings, into yet another universe, so we live on in one way or another.